My heavenly favourite, I’ll come straight out with it: I should have taken a paring knife and incised you like a sore in a claw horn; I should have created some space in the inter-claw cleft so that manure and dirt could drop out and no one could infect you, or perhaps I should have just peeled and trimmed you with the grinder, cleaned you and rubbed you dry with some sawdust, that headstrong summer. How could I have forgotten the warnings they gave us in the classes on hoof-trimming and ailments of the coronet band, on laminitis, on Mortellaro disease (or ‘hairy foot warts’) when I was training to be a vet; how they repeated ad nauseam to be careful you didn’t cut to the quick, Never damage the quick, they said time and time again, but oh my failing, my flaw! That obstinate summer, you lay like a breached calf in the nursery of my degenerate desires, I was madness’s accomplice, I didn’t know how not to desire you, you, my darling chosen one, and the more often I squatted down among the steaming bodies of the Blaarkop cows and sensed your presence close by in the grass that had just been mown and had a rock cress border, where you spent hours under the pear tree, bent over the neck of your snow-white guitar, practising a Cranberries song, the more feverishly I hoped for an abomasum displacement or the removal of a tissue mass, so that I could spend more time near you, listening to you start all over again when you struck the wrong string or reached for a high note with that rippling, angelic voice of yours, and then you’d fall silent for a moment and I imagined you, red-cheeked, blowing away a lock of hair from your face, a lock that kept falling back and oh how beautifully you blew, like a child blowing a dandelion clock; you sang about tanks, bombs, guns, about war, and with everything I did, I thought about you, you, I thought about you when I put on a transparent orange shoulder-length glove, covered it in veterinary lubricant, slid it into the vaginal tract of a dual-purpose cow, or when I put one hand around the feet of a slippery, membrane-encased calf, tugging softly to the rhythm of the contractions, and rubbed the clammy flank of the dam reassuringly with my other hand, when I talked softly to her, sometimes reciting lines from Beckett that I’m not going to repeat here, no one really appreciates them besides you and the Blaarkops, and every time I longed even more passionately for you to hover around me as I put on my green vet’s coat, buttoned it up and set to work; I hoped then that you’d smile at me the way you smiled so sweetly at the wiry farmhands who sat down at the kitchen table at lunchtime behind a wall of piled-up sandwiches spread with a thick layer of butter and filled with smoked sliced sausage, but they didn’t dare make a move, you were an animal they hadn’t learned about at college, you didn’t have four stomachs, you had just one, which was insatiable, and I’d known you since you were little, I knew you through and through, even though you were too young to be desired by me and, at the same time, too spirited and impatient to be patronised or handled in a fatherly manner, and I could tell from the way you acted that you wanted to break free from parental authority, from the farm you’d grown up on, which bore the name De Hulst, after W. G. van de Hulst, the writer of Christian children’s books, the only writer your father had heard of and whose entire works he’d read – he’d read them to you on good days, making you dream you were a sugared bun like in the story, whetting everyone’s appetite and making them want to take a bite out of you, so that you had to protect your sugary body the whole time from the king, the sweet-tooths and ants, and perhaps I should have taken your dream seriously, I realise, now that I write this, even though it was never my intention to write this – I focused mainly on your demeanour, not on your dream, on how you were breaking free, not just from the farm but also from the cowsheds next to it, there was asbestos in the roofs that your father refused to have seen to because God decided whether you got cancer or not, not a few old corrugated roofing sheets, and you were also breaking free from Him, you wanted to escape God and at the same time you were afraid of His wrath, of His final judgement, and sometimes in bed you whispered a line from hymn 118, Deliver me from all my fears. But most of all you wanted to free yourself from your father, who was gentle but very strict, moody and capricious; you wanted to turn your back on him and at the same time still cherish him, the way you cherished Bully, the surly bull, whom you could only stroke when he’d just eaten or mated with a cow, and sometimes you lent him to other farmers, you put the stud fee from each coupling in a jam jar on the chimney breast in the kitchen and used the money to go on holiday, yes, Bully paid for your holidays to Zeeland, and everything your dad gave you there, from sandwich spread to Donald Duck pocket books, he’d say: You should thank Bully for it. And I heard you prying yourself free in the truculent, sullen tone of voice you used when your dad wanted to zip up your overalls, not to protect you from the chilly morning mist but to be able to touch you briefly, his child who was fast outgrowing his rough hands covered in cuts and calluses, and then I’d look at mine that were big and strong enough to clasp yours tightly, I’d held children’s hands before, even though that was different, they clutched at mine, and now I wanted to hold yours, weave my fingers through yours; on your middle finger you wore a plastic ring with a ladybird that you’d got from the orthodontist after they told you that you’d need headgear braces and you were devastated by the news, they let you pick something from the comfort box and you chose this ring that was slightly too big; I would circle your palm for hours with my thumb, like a ruminant with turning sickness. And I only half-listened to your dad’s stories during the coffee break, he was like a combination of Mick Jagger and Rutger Hauer when he spoke fervently about his livestock, the drought in the fields and the ditches, that it would be a poor harvest if the umbellifers were too droopy to be picked and put in a vase – I just nodded along, there wasn’t a vase to be seen in the whole farm, and people who never had any flowers or plants in their house were often troubled by worries of poor harvests, even when it was a good, fertile season, and I nodded again when he told me that cattle liked a monotonous diet, that they were creatures of habit just like he was and that he sometimes played classical music to them, Chopin or Vivaldi, which gave the milk in the evening a creamier taste; I creased my face into a smile at the right moment but I would have preferred to have heard everything about you, I wanted to discuss you the way we discussed the cows, their oestrus and their changeable natures, and I looked at the lawn where you and your brother were jumping on the trampoline, playing who could touch heaven first, who would be the first to tickle Jesus, you wanted to tickle him to death, and later you’d tell me the Romans used to tickle people as a form of torture, they’d tie them down and let a goat lick the soles of their feet for a long time, and as you jumped on the trampoline, higher and higher, your blonde hair danced and shone like cornstalks around your delicate face; I saw how quickly you tired of the game and started staring over the glossy heads of lettuce and leeks in the vegetable plot, eager for the life that lay in wait beyond Het Dorp, you wanted to get away from here like most girls and boys of your age want to leave home, some of them joined the army and became soldiers before returning later, homesick, to the camouflage of Het Dorp, but you were sure you’d never feel nostalgic, everything you owned was inside your head and I couldn’t know at the time that you lacked a home, even though you loved De Hulst farm to deep in its beams, and the idea alone that you would leave, cycle away along the Prikkebeensedijk, swerving to avoid the loose cobbles, abandoning your dad, the idea alone caused you to sigh and turn back to the game on the trampoline, yes, you were bad at saying goodbye, so bad, you’d say later, and I’d soon realised it from the way on a Saturday morning you’d stand around sulking when the young bulls were picked up to be taken to the slaughterhouse, you’d cuddle them and scratch them behind their ears, whispering inaudible words to them; it was only there that I saw how you carried your loss with you, I wanted to be able to take it away with anti-inflammatories, or better still by filling the void, even though we never spoke to one another, even though over the years I came by you often came along to watch me inseminate or examine a cow, you’d bring a bucket of warm water and a saucer with a bar of green soap so that I could wash the blood and shit from my hands and offer me an old checked tea towel – but no word passed your beautifully shaped lips, lips I wanted to palpate, the way I did with animals suffering from bluetongue; you didn’t have bluetongue, you were perfectly healthy and incredibly beguiling and I knew then I’d be the first man in your life to see you the way you wanted to be seen, as a fourteen-year-old adult, all fourteen-year-olds long to be considered more grown-up than they are, but you didn’t just want that, you behaved that way too, and beneath...